The present invention relates to the field of communications and more particularly to a system that allows users to select one or more portions of a speech file transcript and then provide only the selected portions to one or more entities in one or more electronic formats.
Electronic mail and voicemail systems form the foundation of corporate and personal communications. Electronic mail has proven to be even more popular in recent years as the electronic mail systems have become more robust with a variety of useful features like electronic mail return receipts and the ability to attach and transfer files along with the electronic mail messages. Some current hybrid systems also have partially merged the two systems, for example, by allowing a user to check their voicemail through their electronic mail account. This is typically performed by creating an electronic mail version of a voicemail message, such as by having an electronic mail message with a digitized version of the voicemail message attached to the electronic mail message. In this case, the voicemail message may be stored and organized as with other conventional electronic mail messages.
However, none of these prior art systems, electronic mail, voicemail or any hybrid system allows users to selectively capture portions of a voicemail message and forward or send only the selected portions to one or more other users.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system which allows a user to select certain portions of a speech file, such as a voicemail message, in an intuitive manner and then share such selected portions with certain designated parties the user specifies. It would be further desirable to have such an aforementioned system which allows the user to select non-contiguous portions of the speech file and then have only the non-contiguous portions provided to parties the user has specified.